Land Acts: Land's Agency in American Literature, Law, and History from the Colonial Period to Removal
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Date
2024-01-10
Authors
Keeler, Kyle
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation examines land’s agency and relationships to land in the places now known as the United States as these relationships appear in literature and law from early colonization to the removal period. Land Acts is a project of archival recovery and an intervention into American legal imaginaries that have wreaked havoc on ecological systems. I consider texts by John Arthur Gibson and Canassatego (Haudenosaunee), Uncas, Samson Occom, and Joseph Johnson (Mohegan), and Elias Boudinot, Nancy Ward, and John Ross (Cherokee) in contrast to iconic settler legal decisions regarding land, including the Mason Land Case (c. 17th Century), federal Indian Removal Policy (c. 1820s-50s), and contemporary cases such as Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta (2022). Drawing from a framework of key Indigenous concepts such as Glen Coulthard’s (Yellowknives Dene) “grounded normativity,” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (Anishinaabe) “place-based relationality,” Vanessa Watts’ (Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee) “Indigenous place-thought,” and Kyle Powys Whyte’s (Citizen Potawatomi) “systems of responsibility,” I find that Native authors in my primary texts elucidate land’s role as an historical actor, influencer of cultural production, and ally in resistance.
As Indigenous authors and land co-produce literature, history, and legislation, both suggest ecologically sound legal policy in contrast to settler property law, which marks land as a commodity at worst or a tool for communication with a higher power at best. Through agential relationship with land, Native authors offer contexts for resisting settler violence as well as situating land’s needs (and a responsibility to land) at the center of social order. I argue that literature must be reperiodized around legislation centering on land, as Native writers preempt, detail, and respond to such legislation in partnership with land. Once land is understood to influence cultural production, it may be (re)animated in our present moment, and it must be viewed as an agential relation in contemporary resistance to ecologically destructive policy and legislation. As an intervention in American and Indigenous Studies, I am hopeful that Land Acts calls attention to Native ties to land across American history, reminding readers that Native sovereignties are non-negotiable through a studied awareness of the relationships that Native peoples maintain with land.
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Keywords
Environmental Justice, Land, Legal Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Nonhuman Agency, Settler Colonial Studies